Unbelievable!!

Wow!!! I have been contacted by Professor Alessandro Bogliolo from the Computer Sciences department back home – he wants to use my blog as the base for an on-line English language course in Computer Science! It’s really nice of him to think of this, but I didn’t know a blog could be used for this!!!!!! It sounds pretty strange, but great! Do I get royalties (heh heh)?

This is really exciting! It’s “university Big Brother” and the blog will be my confessional room!!!!

Anyway – I’ve pasted Prof. Bogliolo’s message here below – and responded to his e-mail a resounding “SI – D’ACCORDO!”! He will send me the partifculars by e-mail, and I will keep you all informed!!!!

 

From: Alessandro Bogliolo

To: Roberto

Cc: md@sti.uniurb.it

Sent: Thursday, August 30, 2007 22:41 AM

Subject: proposta

Caro Roberto,

ho avuto modo di leggere il blog in inglese che hai aperto in vista del tuo stage a Madison e mi e’ venuta un’idea…

Forse hai saputo che dal 2007/08 il percorso online del nostro corso di laurea adottera’ la metodologia CLIL (content and language integrated learning) per insegnare agli studenti la lingua inglese insieme alle discipline del corso. Esperti docenti di lingue stanno sviluppando un nuovo corso di inglese online per il quale occorre una story line.

L’idea che mi e’ venuta e’ di impostare il corso come un reality di cui tu sia il protagonista. Il tuo blog potrebbe essere lo strumento di osservazione che utilizzeremmo per collegare il corso di inglese alla tua esperienza di studio e lavoro. Con il tuo consenso potremmo ispirarci liberamente alla tua esperienza ed eventualmente utilizzare i tuoi stessi post (che da quanto posso giudicare sono scritti in perfetto inglese) come spunto per alcune lezioni.

Che ne dici?

A.B.

PS: Fammi sapere al piu’ presto perche’ il corso avra’ inizio in ottobre e c’e’ molto lavoro da fare per organizzarlo.

I’M HERE!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

I got to Madison last Wednesday. The plane from Chicago to Madison was delayed because of massive rain – what first impression! It rained hard until Saturday! My first purchase in America was a big umbrella!!!!!!!! Luckily I had already arranged a place to stay via internet – wonderful invention.  I found an “efficiency apartment” (this means 1 room with bathroom and cooking corner (“kitchenette”)) that has internet (which I still need to get hooked up). Right now I’m in an Italian coffee bar on State Street – that has wireless – YAY!!!!!!!!!! I can e-mail and do all the things I need to if I drink enough coffee!!!  It’s great, because for a while I didn’t have internet access.  It’s going to be hot today (91° Fahrenheit – sounds hot) so I ordered an iced café latte and got ALMOST A LITRE of ice cubes in a glass with café latte in it. Wow! Anyway – I’m getting free wireless with my purchase! Mum was happy to get my e-mail.

I was very nervous about arranging my appartment via internet – but I found it very efficient and the appartment is quite nice – although small. It’s only about 15 minutes walking to get down town – and near a store called Wholefoods that sells more than “wonder bread” and orange cheese. YAY!!!!!!! As well, I can get Italian products at Fraboni’s  – which – although prices are high, I can get real coffee and prosciutto there. The coffee is important! Now – where can I buy a mokka!??! Anyway – I didn’t walk around much the first few days – because of the rain. That was a bit, well – long.  My first evening in Madison, the house agent told me to go an Italian restaurant really close to my apartment – but looking at it, I found a nice Lebanese restaurant nearby. This looked more like a restaurant – no plaster statues and neon signs on it! The food was really good – and reasonably priced (particularly if mentally you’re still paying in Euros!) My mum reminded me to leave 15% of the bill for the tip – ugh! adds to the price, but I guess waiters here aren’t paid very well. Anyway – good way to spend a rainy evening.

The next morning I went to Starbucks on University Avenue and had their small four litre coffee! Hah hah – everything big here! I will be big too by time I leave! And I had a real blueberry muffin. I haven’t had one since last time I went to Canada with mum. Tasty.

Downtown Madison is fun to walk around. There are lots of people on State Street – which seems to be the centre of town and leads (logically) to the State Capitol building.  This area is on an isthmus between Lake Mendota and Lake Monona (I asked myself – men’ dota di cosa? heh heh!!!) It was sunny on Sunday (ha ha) so I walked all over the university campus, along lake Mendota.  This was beautiful, as the campus has some high hills that directly overlook the water (Lake Mendota).  I’ll have to go back there for a picnic.

I don’t start work until after “labor day”, which is their worker’s holiday on Monday, September 3rd. I’m a bit nervous, but looking forward to getting started. I will, however, use my last week of vacation to get to know the city as well as possible.

Thanks Kate for all your advice about where to look for the apartment. Now that I see the place in the sun – I think I will be happy here!  How may I thank you for your kindness? Coffee sometime?

Task assignment on IP Multicast

I met my boss on the phone and I learned something more about my internship. My task will be “bandwidth optimization” for real time webcasting, and the starting point is “IP multicast”. The problem is that at the moment I’m quite far from the starting point, since all I know about multicast is what I studied in computer network classes and what I read on Wikipedia. I need to learn as much as possible on this topic before moving to Madison.

Let me start by stating the problem as I’ve got it.

Traditional radioes exploit the inherent broadcast nature of the radio signal to reach all the clients distributed on the area covered by the antennas. The effort required by the transmitter is the same regardless of the number of receivers. On the contrary, the Internet is a packet-switched network primarily conceived to send packets from a single source to a single destination. The effort required to transmit a multimedia stream is proportional to the number of clients!

In other words, when a client connects to a server, it usually establishes a unicast connection that is used to send packets from the server to the client. Roughly speaking, unicast is the opposite of broadcasting. If several clients are simultaneously connected to the server, they all establish unicast connections, imposing the server to send different packets to each client. If the server is a web radio, all the clients are interested in the same stream of packets, but the server needs to generate and send as many copies of each packet as unicast connections established with the clients.

IP multicast is a good tradeoff between broadcasting and unicasting. The multicast support avoid useless packet duplications, sending each packet only once across each link to serve all the clients belonging to a given group.

At the moment, this is more or less all I know about multicast (it’s not that much, isn’i it?) but I hope on your help to find reliable links on the web, including introductory documents and tutorials…

Apt. Rush

Apparently the big day for moving and signing rental contracts in Madison is August 15th! That’s pretty early. I have to secure an appartment on line – which makes me a little bit nervous! I’ve found a couple of places on line though, so it feels good to get started on this. I talked to one property manager in Madison, and the apartment they described seems good enough. Most importantly it is a single and close enough to downtown. IIt should cost about 600 with the utilities included. so I hope the exchange rate is good to me!

My new saviour Kate has given me a lot of information on this – and I would have otherwise waited to find an appartment until after I arrived in Madison – a week or so too late! So – I’m nervous – but mostly excited. THANK YOU KATE!!!!!